Blackhawks fans, bars commit to the Cup again

Third Rail bartender Rick Moschel fires up the crowd before the start of Game 3 of the Western Conference finals. (Nuccio DiNuzzo, Chicago Tribune)

This National Hockey League season started with a lockout that scrapped 40 percent of the scheduled games, a void that was emotionally draining for Chicago Blackhawks fans and financially troubling for establishments around the United Center that cater to them.

A settlement and the Hawks' deep playoff run, which continues against the Los Angeles Kings on Saturday night, have all but cured Hawks fans' lockout blues. Now, with every opening puck drop, the bars and restaurants move closer to making amends with their bottom lines.

"It'll be close," said Jordan Goldberg, manager of Third Rail Tavern, one of a cluster of placeson West Madison Street a few blocks east of the United Center, "because if they get to the Cup, every night will be standing room only in here."

Goldberg and owners of other nearby bars and restaurants have been making calculations. The lockout scratched 34 of the 82 regular-season hockey games. Including Saturday's game, the playoff run has made up 17 of those.

Regardless of the outcome against the Kings on Saturday, the Hawks will play at least two more games. They could play nine more if this series stretches to seven games, the Hawks advance to the Stanley Cup series and they play all seven games. Under that scenario, five games would be played at the United Center, where the Hawks draw more than 21,000 to every game.

That setting would leave the total number of games recovered eight games shy of those that would have been played during a full regular season.

Despite fewer games, business owners pin their financial hopes on receipts of playoff-game customers, which are as much as 50 percent higher than those during regular-season games.

Those proprietors share only the most general information on losses from the lockout. Goldberg said he was off 10 to 20 percent. Across the street, CrossRoads Bar & Grill general manager Greg Mammoser estimated his sales hit was 20 to 25 percent. A few blocks west on Madison, Matt Doherty, general manager at WestEnd tavern, declined to provide an estimate.

"Obviously, any time there aren't 21,000 people in your neighborhood who would have been here, you're going to feel it," Doherty said. "Everybody in the neighborhood did."

Martha Goldstein, executive director of the West Loop Community Organization, a residential and business group, noticed the lack of buzz in the neighborhood.

Almost from the moment the lockout was settled, though, Doherty and Goldstein said, they noticed the buzz had returned and saw people wearing Blackhawks gear within hours. Goldstein said the return of the Hawks has "done wonders for this neighborhood. I've never seen it so lively."

Mammoser calls the playoff run "a lot of fun" for CrossRoads, where the photo gallery includes shots of Hawks head coach Joel Quenneville escorting the Stanley Cup trophy in the establishment. Goldberg has a rotation of Blackhawks sweaters — they're not jerseys — that he wears depending on whether the team wins. His bar features a flashing red light, goal horn and recording of the arena anthem, "Chelsea Dagger," all of which are activated when the Hawks score, just as it's done at the United Center.

The Hawks need only one more goal than the Kings on Saturday to advance to the Stanley Cup, and bitter memories of the lockout will become even more distant. Fans who jammed the Madison Street bars in the West Loop for a recent playoff game against the Kings seem to have accepted labor-management breakdowns in modern professional sports.

"If this went a whole season, a person like me might have taken a couple years off," said Rick Lietzau, 32, of Grayslake, a lifelong Blackhawks fan who plays the sport. But when owners and players reached a long-term agreement and salvaged more than half the season, most fans "just kind of said, 'OK you figured it out,'" added Lietzau, who watched the game at WestEnd. "It really helped that these are the most exciting playoffs I've seen in years."

Brian Jurkovic, 25, who lives in the West Loop and took in the game at Third Rail, said the lockout stalled growing interest the NHL created in recent years in nontraditional hockey markets.

"We might not feel it so much in Chicago," Jurkovic said, "because we're a pretty strong hockey city."

Chicago is one of the first professional hockey cities in the U.S., and the Blackhawks, established in 1926, are among the NHL's "Original Six" franchises.

But the team's fiercely passionate fan base and its profile in sport nearly disappeared in the late 1990s, a consequence many blame on then-owner Bill Wirtz, viewed as stubborn and unimaginative. After his death in September 2007, son Rocky Wirtz took over.